Megan Adamson Sijapati

Megan specializes in the religious traditions of South Asia, particularly Islamic religious cultures, and also Hindu traditions. She has particular expertise in Nepal. Her research interests are in religion and modernity, religious revivalism, experience, materiality, space, and the body.

Megan is currently working on a book titled Religion and Modernity in the Himalaya (under contract with Routledge). It is co-edited with Prof. Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz of the University of Illinois. The book brings together research essays from scholars working across the Himalayas--Tibet, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, and Nepal--to interrogate processes of modernization as they shape religious practices and discourses in the region, and vice versa, and to examine experiences of modernity as they are interwoven within these phenomena.

Megan's first book, Islamic Revival in Nepal: Religion and a New Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), examines contemporary Muslim identity and the rise of Islamic revivalism in the post civil-war context of increased local identity politics and new global networks. It is based on her field research in Nepal between 2005-2010. It has recently been published in paperback (2013), and was released in a special Nepal edition (2012).

Megan's other publications include “Mawdudi’s Islamic Revivalist Ideology and the Islami Sangh Nepal” in the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society (2012),
“The National Muslim Forum Nepal: Experiences of Conflict, Formations of Identity” in Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Nepal: Identities and Mobilization after 1990 ed. by Mahendra Lawoti and Susan Hangen (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), and "Muslims in Nepal: The Local and Global Dimensions of a Changing Religious Minority" in the journal Religion Compass (2011).

Here at Gettysburg College, Megan serves as Co-Director of the Globalization Studies program and serves on the Middle East and Islamic Studies Advisory Committee and the First Year Advisory Council.
She recently finished a four-year term on the Executive Council of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.